What Do Black Holes Sound Like?

Janna Levin, professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College and author of Black Hole Blues, describes the noise that black holes make this way: “You could say black holes are playing drums out there. Space-time is the drum, and black holes are the mallets.” The collision of two black holes, 30 times the mass of the sun and 1.3 billion light-years away, was captured by LIGO as a loud chirp. In this short video, Levin explains how scientists were able to record gravitational waves as sound waves and, for the first time ever, give space a "soundtrack."

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